Most books are sold by pretending everyone should buy them. I would rather tell you upfront who this one isn't for. If any of the sections below describe you, save your twenty-four dollars and ninety-nine cents and go read something else. I mean that.

Founder Fallout is a hundred-question workbook about partnership equity. It came out of four partnerships I have lived through, two of which were ambushes I didn't see coming, and a decade of watching other founders sign paperwork they had not read. If you are already past the parts of business where partnership equity matters, or you are looking for something different than what this book delivers, keep scrolling. The right answer for you isn't always yes.

If you have never started a business and are not planning to start one

This isn't a business-inspiration book, and not a how-to-quit-your-job book. It tells you what to ask before you sign a partnership agreement, and what to do when a partner leaves, dies, gets divorced, gets sued, or turns on you. The book is not about why entrepreneurship is beautiful. If you are five years away from that world, you don't need this book yet. Come back when you have a real deal in front of you.

The book Don't Quit Your Day Job Yet, further in the roadmap after Ashes to Empires and Before You Blow It, is closer to what you are looking for. That one is the hundred questions you should be able to answer before you even start a new business. Don't quit your day job until your new business does not notice your paycheck. That book will exist eventually. This one won't solve that problem.

If you are a solo founder and you plan to stay solo

Founder Fallout is a partnership book. Every chapter is written for the founder who has, or will have, at least one other name on the corporate paperwork. Equity partners, co-founders, minority owners, silent partners, family shareholders. If you are the only owner of your company and you intend to stay that way forever, most of this book won't apply to you.

There are still two or three chapters you would find useful, on advisor equity and on employee option grants, but the other ninety-seven questions are not aimed at you. Buy something else. Save the money.

If you are looking for a motivational or feel-good book

I write to make you ask the right question before you sign the wrong paper, not to make you feel better. There are chapters in Founder Fallout about betrayal, about paying legal fees you can't afford, about the moment you realize your partner has been planning your exit for six months while you were building product. None of that is uplifting, and it was never designed to be.

If you are looking for a book that will get you fired up for Monday morning, this is the wrong book. Read Ryan Holiday. Read David Goggins. Read Simon Sinek. Those are all excellent writers. That is not what I do here.

If you are already through your first partnership dispute and it ended clean

Some founders have done one partnership deal, had one partner leave, and it went well. Everyone signed everything, everyone walked away with what they were owed, nobody sued anyone, everybody still gets a Christmas card. If that is you, you probably already know most of what is in this book by instinct. You might still find a few chapters useful for the next deal. You might not.

I still think you would enjoy the read, but I won't oversell it. The book is priced fairly for someone who is about to walk into their first real partnership, not for someone who has already learned this by living it.

If you refuse to write anything down

The whole book is a workbook. There is space to write in it. There are questions that require you to actually draft an answer, hand it to your prospective partner, and compare what they wrote to what you wrote. If you are the kind of founder who runs everything from memory and refuses to put anything on paper, the book will feel like homework you didn't sign up for.

I built it that way on purpose. The most expensive mistakes I have made in partnership deals were things I understood in my head but never wrote down and never asked my partner to write down either. If you won't do that part, you won't get the value out of the book.

If you want a lawyer's opinion

I am not a lawyer, and Founder Fallout is a founder's playbook, not legal advice. It comes from what I have lived and what I have watched other founders live. Every hard chapter ends with a note that says talk to your lawyer, then use these questions to prepare for that conversation. The book makes your legal fees cheaper because you show up prepared, not because it replaces the lawyer.

If you are looking for a book that is a substitute for a real corporate attorney, that book does not exist and nobody honest is selling it. Go pay a lawyer.

If you were expecting a tech-founder book

I am not a tech founder. Murphy Door is a manufacturing company. We make physical hidden doors and hand-built ladders in three American plants. My other companies are in real estate, hospitality, and consumer products. The examples in Founder Fallout come from those worlds.

Almost every principle in the book applies to a software company too, because equity is equity and betrayal is betrayal. But if you were expecting Silicon Valley cap tables, term sheets, and Series A vesting cliffs, that is not the flavor of the book. Read Venture Deals by Brad Feld for that. It is excellent.

If you think a good vibe replaces a good contract

Most partnership disasters I have seen started with two founders who liked each other and skipped the paperwork because the trust felt obvious. The paperwork is how you protect the trust on the day the trust gets tested. Founder Fallout is going to keep asking you to write things down that feel unnecessary because the two of you get along. Every one of those questions is there because I have watched a friendship that started that strong end in a courtroom.

If you believe that a good vibe between two founders replaces a good operating agreement, you will find this book annoying. You will feel like it does not trust the two of you. It does not, and it is not supposed to. The book trusts the two of you the way an insurance policy trusts a driver. The driver is probably fine. The policy is there for the day the driver is not.

The founders I trust most are the ones who welcome the paperwork instead of resenting it. If you are already in that camp, skip this section. If you are in the other camp, and you and your co-founder are about to sign on a handshake, please read the book before you sign anything. The book is affordable. The mistake it prevents is not.

Who Founder Fallout is for

If you scrolled this far and none of those disqualifiers hit, you are probably the right reader. This book was written for the founder who is either about to sign a partnership agreement, is inside a partnership right now and can feel something is off, or has just been ambushed and is trying to make sense of what happened. It was also written for the operator who has been quietly promoted into an equity conversation with their boss and does not want to walk in blind.

For the paperwork side of what the book covers, see the seven-move co-founder equity playbook.

If that is you, read the FAQ next to see what the book covers, then buy it here for twenty-four dollars and ninety-nine cents direct, or on Amazon in paperback or Kindle.

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